BuildNZ 2026: what the CEOs of Naylor Love, Hawkins and Dominion said about where construction goes next

Steve Parker
Jul 15
5 min read

Reported by Steve Parker, founder of Trueworks, from the floor at BuildNZ 2026, Auckland Showgrounds · 15 July 2026 · 6 min read

We spent Wednesday at BuildNZ 2026 at Auckland Showgrounds, and the session worth the ticket was the Hubexo Construction League panel inside The Future of Housing Summit, run in partnership with Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects. One stage, six people who between them touch a meaningful share of New Zealand's vertical construction: Bruno Goedeke, chief executive of Naylor Love; Craig Treloar, executive general manager of Hawkins; Kerin Russell-Smith, director of Dominion Constructors; Ankit Sharma, chief executive of Registered Master Builders; Kirsten Magnusson of Building Institute Aotearoa; and Ben Hurrell, New Zealand country manager at Hubexo, whose Construction League data framed the discussion.

What follows comes from our notes in the room. Where we quote, we're reporting what we heard; the paraphrases are ours.

Building got slower, not faster

The line that set the tone came from Hawkins' Craig Treloar. In 2010, he told the room, you could build fast in this country. Fifteen years later the same building takes longer, because seismic requirements, fire engineering and the general weight of compliance have made every stage more complex. Nobody on the stage disputed it.

That matters beyond the big end of town. Complexity doesn't stay politely inside the head contract; it flows down through every subcontract as tighter specs, more interfaces between trades, and more things that can change after you've priced. A building that's harder to design and consent is a building that generates more variations, and the panel's own diagnosis says that pressure is structural, not cyclical.

Where the work actually is

Ask a room of CEOs where the pipeline sits and you get a straight answer, because they've already bet on it. Treloar pointed to government and institutional work; Hawkins has said publicly that "health, education, defence, justice and airports are pillars of our pipeline" (BCI Central, 2025 Construction League), and he repeated the substance of that on stage, adding infrastructure to the list. Goedeke named health and education for Naylor Love, saw growth coming in wind and solar, and flagged an Australian data-centre second wave that New Zealand firms are watching closely.

Russell-Smith's contribution was more local and arguably more useful: Auckland's MDRS-driven intensification is running ahead of the infrastructure underneath it, and the gap between zoned capacity and serviced land is where a lot of housing ambition will stall.

If you're a subcontractor deciding which head contractors to follow into which sectors, that ten-minute stretch of panel was the market map.

People first, and hire for attitude

Every panellist landed on the same answer to the capability question, which was itself the story. Goedeke: invest in people, and interview for cultural fit and attitude before skills. Treloar: same. Russell-Smith put it as bluntly as anyone: people, people. For complex projects, Goedeke argued, experience, skill and teamwork carry more weight than any tool on site, since complexity punishes weak teams faster than it punishes weak technology.

The exhibition floor downstairs told the other half of the story. Drones, 3D cameras, time-lapse rigs, back-office automation; every vendor pitch reduced to the same sentence: solve a problem, save time. The buyers walking those aisles weren't shopping for transformation. They wanted hours back.

Sharma bridged the two worlds with the most quotable line of the afternoon. AI, he said, will have "a bigger impact than they realise", the "they" being much of the industry the Master Builders represent. From the association that certifies a large share of the country's builders, that's not a vendor talking their book.

The warning about risk

Then Goedeke said the thing we'd have paid for the ticket twice to hear. Builders, he warned, keep accepting risk on projects that isn't theirs to carry. Don't become the insurance company for your client.

He was talking to main contractors about principals, but the logic cascades. The head contractor who takes bad risk from the client passes it down; the subcontract is where it lands. Wide indemnities, compressed notice periods for variations and EOTs, retentions tied to someone else's completion date. We wrote about the exact clauses subbies are now being taught to catch last week; hearing the CEO of a billion-dollar builder describe the top of the same waterfall was confirmation from the other end of the chain.

Goedeke also pushed for loosening what materials can come into the country, with approval pathways for overseas standards we can trust. Sensible, and worth watching, because substituted products certified to unfamiliar standards are exactly where spec disputes and warranty arguments breed.

What we took home

Three panellists run or direct firms building New Zealand's biggest projects, and their consensus was: work is moving toward government-backed sectors, buildings are structurally harder to deliver than they were fifteen years ago, and the industry's biggest exposure isn't technology or labour but badly allocated risk. None of that is comfortable, and all of it is tradeable information for anyone pricing work this quarter.

Where Trueworks fits

Trueworks does one job: independent checking of quotes, tenders and variations for the people who carry the risk the panel was talking about. When a variation lands on a complex job, or a tender arrives with the head contract's risk quietly stepped down into your subcontract, we check the quantities, the rates and the terms against the drawings and the code, in writing, with citations. We don't act for the other side of your job.

Pricing a tender right now? Send the pack — take-off checked, rates benchmarked, risks flagged, in writing, within 24 hours. Send us the drawings and the quote, tender or variation. You get a written, code-cited check back within 24 hours. No charge for your first check. No card, no obligation. NDA available. → Get the free check at trueworks.co.nz/contact — or email hello@trueworks.co.nz

About the reporter

Steve Parker is the founder of Trueworks and spent 20 years on the analytical side of NZ construction before building it — variation reviews, contract advisory, and quote-and-tender checking for the subcontractors and builders who carry the risk. He was in the room at BuildNZ 2026. Every Trueworks check is signed off by him before it goes out.